One of the biggest challenges in running any warehouse, stockroom, shipping area, supply depot, retail center, restaurant, bar, or any other item-based business is taking inventory. Taking inventory is an incredibly time and labor intensive task that costs millions of dollars per year. Yet inventory must be taken accurately and often. If too many items are kept in inventory, then capital is tied up in inventory and storage space becomes costly and problematic. If too few items are kept in inventory, then the business may run out of items to sell when a customer wants them, resulting in missed sales and lost customers. Also, businesses need to monitory inventory to detect breakage, theft, and other causes of lost inventory to address those inventory losses.
There have been advances in technology for monitoring the inventory of large, whole items for storage, shipping, and retail businesses. Barcodes are often scanned to monitor inventory as it arrives and departs from the business. Retail businesses often use radio frequency identification (RFID) tags to monitor and/or prevent theft of items, especially garments and electronics.
However, despite all of these advances, there remains a need for an inventory system that can track the inventory of items having an amount of content that varies over time. For example, consider the plight of the beverage and hospitality industry. Many bars have significant amounts of money invested in inventories of alcoholic beverages that are stored in many different bottles. The bottles may be opened or unopened; the contents may be sold by the bottle, by the glass, or by the portion for mixed drinks; and the contents may have vastly different prices per serving. Worse, during peak times, bartenders may not be able to place an opened bottle in the exact position where it was previously stored. Bartenders may not be able to find the opened bottle and may open another one. Also, consumers often buy different amounts of the contents of a bottle at different rates over different periods of time. Then there is the issue of content loss due to evaporation of alcohols that sit for months after being opened.
This inventory dilemma has created a huge headache for the beverage and hospitality industry. Many bars and hotels are forced to spend hours per day taking inventory of every bottle of alcoholic beverage, often multiple times per day. This task can cost a business tens of thousands of dollars in wages and be the most unpleasant part of any bartender's job.
This example is hardly isolated. The inventory of containers often depends on taking an inventory of the contents of opened containers. For example, many hospitals need to track how many pills remain in an opened bottle and where the bottle is located. Many sellers of small amounts of solids or liquids need to track inventory of chemicals, such as a solid, a liquid, or a slurry; small parts, such as nuts, bolts, and screws; and consumables, such as coffee, tea, sugar, and nuts; or any other item where it is inconvenient or impossible to attach an inventory label to the product itself.
There remains a need for an inventory system that can track the number of containers in an inventory as well as an amount of content in the opened containers. There remains a need to track where specific containers are actually located instead of where they are supposed to be located. There remains a need to cost effectively maintain real-time records of the number, location, and content of containers and opened containers.